Now available in a Grove edition for the first time, Dalva is one of the finest novels by New York Times bestselling, much beloved author Jim Harrison: a beautifully crafted story of one woman's journey to find her son. From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam--and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul. One of Harrison's most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America's most memorable writers.

After being blinded in one eye, a young boy becomes wild and unruly, until he discovers the wonders of nature in the Michigan woods near his family's summer cabin.

New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of America's most beloved and critically acclaimed writers. The classic Legends of the Fall is Harrison at his most memorable: a striking collection of novellas written with exceptional brilliance and a ferocious love of life. The title novella, "Legends of the Fall"--which was made into the film of the same name--is an epic, moving tale of three brothers fighting for justice in a world gone mad. Moving from the raw landscape of early twentieth-century Montana to the blood-drenched European battlefields of World War I and back again to Montana, Harrison's powerful story explores the theme of revenge and the actions to which people resort when their lives or goals are threatened, painting an unforgettable portrait of the twentieth-century man. Also including the novellas "Revenge" and "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," Legends of the Fall confirms Jim Harrison's reputation as one of the finest American voices of his generation.

In the universally-praised Returning to Earth, Jim Harrison has delivered a masterpiece a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and the possibility of finding redemption in unlikely places. Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. His condition deteriorating, he realizes no one will be able to pass on to his children their family history once he is gone. He begins dictating to his wife, Cynthia, stories he has never shared with anyone as around him, his family struggles to lay him to rest with the same dignity with which he has lived. Over the course of the year following Donald's death, his daughter begins studying Chippewa ideas of death for clues about her father's religion, while Cynthia, bereft of the family she created to escape the malevolent influence of her own father, finds that redeeming the past is not a lost cause. Returning to Earth is a deeply moving book about origins and endings, making sense of loss, and living with honor for the dead. It is among the finest novels of Harrison's long, storied career, and confirms his standing as one of the most important American writers now working.

An epic tale that pits a son against the legacy of his family's desecration of the earth, and his own father's more personal violations, Jim Harrison's True North is a beautiful and moving novel that speaks to the territory in our hearts that calls us back to our roots. The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at fourteen by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes to adulthood-often guided and enlightened by the unforgettable, intractable, courageous women he loves-he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers' rapacious destruction of the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as the working people who made their wealth possible. Jim Harrison has given us a family tragedy of betrayal, amends, and justice for the worst sins. True North is a bravura performance from one of our finest writers, accomplished with deep humanity, humor, and redemptive soul.

The Road Home lies in the shadows of Manifest Destiny and Wounded Knee; it is etched into the landscape of an old man's memory and into the stubborn dreams of a young man's heart. In Jim Harrison's latest masterpiece, five members of the Northridge family narrate the tangled epic of their history on the expanses of the Nebraska plains. They strive to understand their fates, reconcile with demons of the past, love with honor, live in accordance with the land and the lessons in humility it teaches them. And to die with grace. As the family grapples with the mysterious forces that both pull them apart and draw them inextricably back together, they learn of life's lessons: the deception of passion, the pain of love, the vitality of art, and the supplication to nature's generosity and fury.

"Poems, where I come from," writes Robert Bringhurst, "are spoken to be written and written to be spoken. The Tree of Meaning is a book of critical prose composed in the same way." Together, these thirteen lectures present a superbly grounded approach to the study of language, focusing on storytelling, mythology, comparative literature, humanity, and the breadth of oral culture. Bringhurst's commitment to what he calls "ecological linguistics" emerges in his studies of Native American art and storytelling, his understanding of poetry, and his championing of a more truly universal conception of what constitutes literature. This collection features a sustained focus on Haida culture, the process of translation, and the relationship between beings and language. Compiling ten years of work, this book is remarkable not only for the cohesion of its author's own ideas, but for the synthesis of such wide-ranging perspectives and examples of cultures both human and nonhuman. Applying his trademark enthusiasm and ecologically conscious, humanitarian approach, Bringhurst produces a highly personalized and active study of Native American art and literature, world languages, philosophy, and natural history.

Rapturously received by critics and enthusiastically embraced by readers, The Great Leader is an enthralling, blackly comic take on the detective story that follows a retired detective in hilarious and bold pursuit of a sinister cult leader. Detective Sunderson is on the verge of retirement when he begins to investigate a hedonistic cult that has set up camp near his home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. At first, the self-declared Great Leader seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his unlikely sixteen-year-old sidekick dig deeper, they find him more intelligent and sinister than they realized. Recently divorced and frequently pickled in alcohol, Sunderson tracks his quarry from the woods of Michigan to a town in Arizona, filled with professional and criminal border-crossers, and on to Nebraska where the Great Leader's most recent recruits have gathered to glorify his questionable religion. But Sunderson's demons are also in pursuit of him. Rich with character, unexpected twists, and Harrison's trademark wry wit, The Great Leader is at once a gripping American odyssey and the poignant story of a man grappling with age, lost love, and his own darker nature.

In three novellas, Jim Harrison takes us on an American journey as he leads us through the wondrous landscape of the human heart. "Julip" follows a bright and resourceful young woman as she tries to spring her brother from a Florida jail--he shot three of her former lovers "below the belt." "The Seven-Ounce Man" continues the picaresque adventures of Brown Dog, a Michigan scoundrel who loves to eat, drink, and chase women, all while sailing along in the bottom 10 percent. "The Beige Dolorosa" is the haunting tale of an academic who, recovering from the repercussions of a sexual harassment scandal, turns to the natural world for solace. In each of these stories, the irresistible pull of nature becomes a magnificent backdrop for exploring the toughest questions about life and love.

Johnny Lundgren, a.k.a. Warlock, is an unemployed foundation executive who, after surviving a midlife crisis, finally decides to get a job. Warlock soon gets hired by a crazy, but genius doctor as a trouble-shooter, where he's tasked with everything battling poachers in the haunted wilderness of northern Michigan to investigating his employer’s wife and son in the seamy underside of Key West. A comedy with one foot in the abyss, Warlock is what the New York Times called “farcical, reflective, luscious, gritty� entertainment from one of this country’s most beloved authors.

The New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. Praised as "a raunchy, funny, swaggering, angry, cocksure book." (The New York Times Book Review), Wolf tells the story of a man who-after too many nameless women and drunken nights-leaves Manhattan to roam the wilderness of northern Michigan, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare wolves that prowl that territory. Returning Harrison fans will be ecstatic to find this in print once again, and for new readers, this work serves as the perfect introduction to Harrison's remarkable insight, storytelling, and evocation of the natural world.

"A Really Big Lunch showcases Harrison's enthusiastic, funny, and uncompromising views on how to eat, drink, and live well . . . His writing is bodily, bawdy, sharp. The more we have of his voice, the better."--Boston Globe A national bestseller and an Amazon Best Book of the Month in the Cookbook/Food & Wine category, now in paperback, A Really Big Lunch collects many of New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison's essays on food for the first time--and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. In these pieces, Harrison muses on the relationship between hunter and prey, interrogates the obscure language of wine reviews, and delivers a manifesto against the bland, mass-produced food of our time, proposing instead what he calls the Vivid Diet. He delights in food from the most outre indulgence (a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses) to a simple bowl of menudo. Harrison's food writing is a program for living, and A Really Big Lunch is shot through with his pointed apercus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison's life over the last fifteen years. Lovingly introduced by master chef Mario Batali, A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite. "The collection is chockablock with . . . zingers as well as plenty of half-baked, hilarious theories you can ponder while planning your first summer barbecue."--The Paris Review

New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of America's most beloved and critically acclaimed writers. The classic Legends of the Fall is Harrison at his most memorable: a striking collection of novellas written with exceptional brilliance and a ferocious love of life. The title novella, 'Legends of the Fall' - which was made into the film of the same name - is an epic, moving tale of three brothers fighting for justice in a world gone mad. Moving from the raw landscape of early twentieth-century Montana to the blood-drenched European battlefields of World War I and back again to Montana, Harrison's powerful story explores the theme of revenge and the actions to which people resort when their lives or goals are threatened, painting an unforgettable portrait of the twentieth-century man. Also including the novellas 'Revenge' and 'The Man Who Gave Up His Name,' Legends of the Fall confirms Jim Harrison's reputation as one of the finest American voices of his generation.

"The way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin's, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing."-Hayden Carruth, Sulfur

"Harrison inhabits the problems of our age as if they were beasts into which he had crawled, and Letters to Yesenin is a kind of imaginative taxidermy that refuses to stay in place up on the trophy room wall, but insists on walking into the dining room."-The American Poetry Review

Jim Harrison's gorgeous, desperate, and harrowing "correspondence" with Sergei Yesenin-a Russian poet who committed suicide after writing his final poem in his own blood-is considered an American masterwork.

In the early 1970s, Harrison was living in poverty on a hardscrabble farm, suffering from depression and suicidal tendencies. In response he began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin. Through this one-sided correspondence, Harrison unloads to this unlikely hero, ranting and raving about politics, drinking problems, family concerns, farm life, and a full range of daily occurrences. The rope remains ever present.

Yet sometime through these letters there is a significant shift. Rather than feeling inextricably linked to Yesenin's inevitable path, Harrison becomes furious, arguing about their imagined relationship: "I'm beginning to doubt whether we ever would have been friends."

In the end, Harrison listened to his own poems: "My year-old daughter's red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."

From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam, and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul. One of Harrison's most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America's most memorable writers.

“Among the most indelible American novelists of the last hundred years. . . . [Harrison] remains at the height of his powers.â€�—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Trenchant and visionary.â€�—Ron Carlson, The New York Times Book Review A New York Times best-seller, enthusiastically received by critics and embraced by readers, The River Swimmer is Jim Harrison at his most memorable: two men, one young and one older, confronting inconvenient loves and the encroachment of urbanity on nature, written with freshness, abundant wit, and profound humanity. In “The Land of Unlikeness,â€� Clive—a failed artist, divorced and grappling with the vagaries of his declining years—reluctantly returns to his family’s Michigan farmhouse to visit his aging mother. The return to familiar territory triggers a jolt of renewal—of ardor for his high school sweetheart, of his relationship with his estranged daughter, and of his own lost love of painting. In “The River Swimmer,â€� Harrison ventures into the magical as an Upper Peninsula farm boy is irresistibly drawn to swimming as an escape, and sees otherworldly creatures in the water. Faced with the injustice and pressure of coming of age, he takes to the river and follows its siren song all the way across Lake Michigan. The River Swimmer is an exceptional reminder of why Jim Harrison is one of the most cherished and important writers at work today. “Two years have gone by since I first suggested to President Obama that he create a new Cabinet post, and appoint distinguished fiction writer Jim Harrison as secretary for quality of life. The president still has not responded to my suggestion. . . . [The River Swimmer] deepens and broadens [Harrison’s] already openhearted and smart-minded sense of the way we live now, and what we might do to improve it.â€�—Alan Cheuse, NPR

The New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. Sundog is a powerful novel about the life and loves of a foreman named Robert Corvus Strang, who worked on giant dam projects around the world until he was crippled in a fall down a three-hundred-foot dam. Now as he tries to regain use of his legs, he has a chance to reassess his life, and a blase journalist who has heard of Strang's reputation in the field arrives to draw him out about his various incarnations. Strang who has the violently heightened sensibilities of a man who has gone to the limits and back recounts his monumental life moving from Michigan to Africa and the Amazon, including his several marriages and children, and dozens of lovers. "A feisty, passionate novel" (Newsday) from a writer whose "storytelling instincts are nearly flawless" (The New York Times), Sundog is a story as true and gripping as real life, and ultimately as victorious.

James Welch never shied away from depicting the lives of Native Americans damned by destiny and temperament to the margins of society. "The Death of Jim Loney" is no exception. Jim Loney is a mixed-blood, of white and Indian parentage. Estranged from both communities, he lives a solitary, brooding existence in a small Montana town. His nights are filled with disturbing dreams that haunt his waking hours. Rhea, his lover, cannot console him; Kate, his sister, cannot penetrate his world. In sparse, moving prose, Welch has crafted a riveting tale of disenfranchisement and self-destruction.

Selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Off to the Side is the tale of one of America's most beloved writers. Jim Harrison traces his upbringing in Michigan amid the austerities of the Depression and the Second World War, and the seemingly greater austerities of his starchy Swedish forebears. He chronicles his coming-of-age, from a boy drunk with books to a young man making his way among fellow writers he deeply admires including Peter Matthiessen, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. Harrison discusses forthrightly the life-changing experience of becoming a father, and the minor cognitive dissonance that ensued when this boy from the "heartland" somehow ended up a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter. He gives free rein to his "seven obsessions" alcohol, food, stripping, hunting and fishing (and the dogs who have accompanied him in both), religion, the road, and our place in the natural world which he elucidates with earthy wisdom and an elegant sense of connectedness. Off to the Side is a work of great beauty and importance, a triumphant achievement that captures the writing life and brings all of us clues for living.

"What Harrison does on every page of "Brown Dog" is have fun . . . not simply for the sake of delight but because he believes delight is as close to sublimity as humans can get. . . . The great project of life, he reminds us, is to sit still long enough to appreciate it." --Anthony Doerr, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Brown Dog is . . . an everyman on the most fundamental level . . . vividly, evocatively, alive. . . . These novellas read like a nuanced conversation between author and character. . . . Masterful." --David Ulin, "Los Angeles Times"
"New York Times" best-selling author Jim Harrison is one of America's most beloved writers. Of all his creations, Brown Dog has earned cult status with readers in the more than two decades since his first appearance, scrambling to stay out of jail after his salvage-diving operation uncovers the frozen body of an Indian man in the waters of Lake Superior. A "Publishers Weekly" Best Book of the Year, now in paperback, this book gathers together all the Brown Dog novellas, including one that has never been published.
Brown Dog is a bawdy, reckless, down-on-his-luck Michigan Indian, a former pulp cutter who looks on work as something to do when he needs money, far inferior to the pleasures of fishing. Of course, the flip side of this is that he's never far from catastrophe. Overindulging in food, drink, and women while just scraping by, B.D. meets a nubile archaeologist who presses him for the location of a sacred Native American burial ground; the ensuing flirtation with radicalization results in B.D. wandering Los Angeles in search of a stolen bearskin. When he returns home a little older and wiser, B.D. will seek out family and end up pining for the lesbian social worker who's pushing him toward stability. The collection culminates with "He Dog," written for this book, which finds B.D. still marginally employed and looking for love (or sometimes just a few beers and a roll in the hay) as he goes on a road trip from Michigan to Montana and back, in search of an answer to the riddle of family and, perhaps, a chance at redemption.
Witty and poignantly human, "Brown Dog" underscores Harrison's place as one of America's most irrepressible writers, and one of our finest practitioners of the novella form. It is the ideal introduction (or reintroduction) to Harrison's irresistible everyman.